Dem
47
GOP
53
On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that the law saying that TikTok had to cease operations before Jan. 19 unless its U.S. operations were sold to a U.S. company was constitutional. At 9 p.m. EST on Friday, TikTok went dark. The company replaced the app with this screen:
The app was also removed from both Apple's and Google's app stores. The law states that the president may extend the deadline one time for 90 days if TikTok can show it has made progress in selling the app. What Congress meant is that if there are serious negotiations between TikTok and one or more potential U.S. buyers and they are haggling over the price, the president can give them 90 days to complete the deal. As far as we know, there are no such negotiations in progress, although Walmart, Microsoft, Oracle and some private consortia have previously expressed interest in buying TikTok's U.S. operations. Nevertheless, Donald Trump has said he will extend the deadline by 90 days to give himself time to discuss the matter with TikTok and the leaders of Congress, who passed the law by a large bipartisan majority and would not be happy if he just ignored Congress and the Supreme Court and did nothing. After Trump made this announcement, TikTok went back on the air yesterday. Trump's extension today without any path to a sale is probably illegal, but of all the laws he plans to break, this one is probably the least significant.
Trump has a lot of things on his plate on Day 1 and TikTok is not a high priority. Invoking the 90-day extension was easy. The hard part comes later. When making an actual decision what to do with the app, Trump must take into account the following factors:
All of these can be dealt with by simply forcing the Chinese company that owns the app, ByteDance, to sell it to an American company or group of American investors. ByteDance won't like this, but if Trump tells them that if they don't it will be banned forever, they will sell it, especially since one consortium has already bid $20 billion for it, without the algorithm that shovels content to users. If ByteDance held an auction, it could probably get more. Surely that is better than just killing it off and getting nothing. Then again, maybe Elon Musk could come to the rescue. Bidding $25 billion would be cheap compared to the $44 billion he paid for eX-Twitter. Then he would own a large part of the social media space and could use it to promote Trump and make it hard for Trump to dump him, no matter how hard Steve Bannon tries.
Even if Trump forces ByteDance to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to some U.S. company, preferably one that does not raise antitrust concerns, he has other problems to deal with. For one thing, once the ban became imminent, users began to flock to alternative sites—and not U.S.-based ones like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, for some reason. Instead they are moving to Lemon8 and RedNote, both of which are also owned by Chinese companies and would also be forced to divest their U.S. operations under the same law that banned TikTok. Of course, if new AG Pam Bondi announced that, law or no law, she wasn't going to prosecute anyone for violating it, it could be dicey. Would Google's lawyers or Apple's lawyers allow their respective app stores to host apps that were technically in violation of the law because the AG said that she would not prosecute them for doing so? They know very well this could lead to blackmail. If either company ever did anything Trump didn't like, Bondi could change "her" mind and prosecute them. Telling the judge "But she said breaking the law was fine with her" is not going to carry much weight. They are going to want Congress to formally repeal the law, which may not be so easy.
A second problem is that Trump is publicly very anti-China. So is Rubio. Caving to China is going to look weak. Also, caving to China on apps and simultaneously imposing tariffs on China sends a very mixed message, which could anger Congress, freak out the stock market, and upset the base.
Yesterday, Trump floated the idea of having TikTok be run as a joint Chinese-U.S. project. This would certainly be valuable to the U.S. partner, which could make a lot of money from this. Unfortunately, it would do nothing to prevent ByteDance from turning over all the data on Americans to the Chinese government. But it would provide an opportunity for a company Trump wants to reward to make a lot of money. Leave it to Trump to take a national security problem, not solve the national security problem, and then turn it into a money-making opportunity for some billionaire he likes. Larry Ellison, the cofounder of Oracle, is a long-time Trump supporter and Oracle certainly has the technical know-how to run TikTok, so Trump might decide that allowing Oracle to buy half of the U.S. part of TikTok is a great solution. Remember, Trump hates China, but when there is money to be made for himself or a strong supporter, everything else is forgotten. It works for Vladimir Putin and his team of oligarchs, so why not in America?
As an aside, you may have seen, there is a lot of speculation about who gave Rudy Giuliani enough money to make a deal with the two Georgia election workers he defamed. Since they could have gotten two condos and some other paraphernalia worth around $12 million in all by just staying the course, the offer to them probably had to be a bit more, say in the $15-20 million ballpark. It is at least conceivable that the CEO of TikTok, looking for a way to make Trump happy, might have decided that "loaning" Giuliani $20M and agreeing in writing to forgive the loan if he didn't flip on Trump in his Arizona or Georgia criminal cases, was easily worth a large multiple of $20M. Ungrateful as he is, Trump might still have appreciated a small gesture like that. We'll probably never know because we presume that whoever the sugar daddy was, they created a shell company to pass the money directly to Giuliani, so the two women would not know where it came from. All they would see is that it came from Giuliani's personal bank account. Maybe even Giuliani would be kept in the dark about the true source of the money to make sure he didn't spill the beans by accident. Needless to say, this is just wild speculation. (V)